A unit of what?

My cursory research, at that link, suggests that the answer is yes. “Anemia“? No results. “Hair“? 12, including several (supposedly) by the top guy at the Beauty Network. “Cancer“? 38, so far, inncluding three in the first page of results for the biggest spam giveaway, Mesothelioma. Search for anything. Watch the results.

If this is about a fight with Wikipedia, I’d say it’s no contest. But it’s not. It’s about the corrupting influence of pure scammy ambition. Even if Google doesn’t have that, it plays host to plenty. And Knol (born on 23 July) was barely out of the womb before it got infected with it.

The only antidote, perhaps, is more knols like Bernie DeKoven‘s one on Pointless Games. That’s how I found Knol, by the way. News of its birth had escpaped me.

13 comments

The definition of “knol” as a “unit of knowledge” is ludicrous. Does a “knol” article contain one unit? Do these units have any standard weight / size / shape / word count? Are they comparable in any way? Are they dividable into sub-knols? Isn’t each spam-link its own knol?

I recently searched on Google for Avast anti-virus software – the personal version is free. I clicked on the first link, a Google sponsored link, because it seemed to be what I was looking for. After a few minutes of looking around on the website, I discovered it was a scam. The website had nothing to do with Avast. They were trying to trick me into buying their own software, by pretending to be Avast. Why does Google allow this website to have a sponsored link? What happened to “do no evil”? How many of Google sponsored links are scams?